Top 400 Jonathan Swift Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 9

51. “The tiny Lilliputians surmise that Gulliver’s watch may be his god, because it is that which, he admits, he seldom does anything without consulting.”

— Jonathan Swift

52. “The sight of you is good for sore eyes.”

— Jonathan Swift

53. “The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it.”

— Jonathan Swift

54. “The two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.”

— Jonathan Swift

55. “Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.”

— Jonathan Swift

56. “Where I am not understood, it shall be concluded that something very useful and profound is couched underneath.”

— Jonathan Swift

57. “If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last.”

— Jonathan Swift

58. “A chuck under the chin is worth two kisses.”

— Jonathan Swift

59. “Words are but wind; and learning is nothing but words; ergo, learning is nothing but wind.”

— Jonathan Swift

60. “Many a truth is told in jest.”

— Jonathan Swift

61. “Books, the children of the brain.”

— Jonathan Swift

62. “Though Diogenes lived in a tub, there might be, for aught I know, as much pride under his rags, as in the fine-spun garments of the divine Plato.”

— Jonathan Swift

63. “When a man of genius appears in the world, it is immediately recognized by the fact that all the blockheads join forces against him.”

— Jonathan Swift

64. “We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.”

— Jonathan Swift

65. “Live every day as your last, because one of these days, it will be.”

— Jonathan Swift

66. “It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”

— Jonathan Swift

67. “Some dire misfortune to portend, no enemy can match a friend.”

— Jonathan Swift

68. “For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.”

— Jonathan Swift

69. “Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions, and consequently of no use to a good king or a good ministry; for which reason Courts are so overrun with politics.”

— Jonathan Swift

70. “Venus, a beautiful, good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage: and they were always mortal enemies.”

— Jonathan Swift

71. “For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.”

— Jonathan Swift

72. “Argument is the worst sort of conversation.”

— Jonathan Swift

73. “A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle.”

— Jonathan Swift

74. “The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.”

— Jonathan Swift

75. “I shall be like that tree-I shall die at the top.”

— Jonathan Swift

76. “For, what though his Head be empty, provided his Common place-Book be full...”

— Jonathan Swift

77. “This Day, whate’er the Fates decree; Shall still be kept with Joy by me: This Day then, let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old.”

— Jonathan Swift

78. “Fine words! I wonder where you stole them.”

— Jonathan Swift

79. “Cruel people are ever cowards in emergency.”

— Jonathan Swift

80. “Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character.”

— Jonathan Swift

81. “Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.”

— Jonathan Swift

82. “Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.”

— Jonathan Swift

83. “Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where sometimes there is a vein of gold which the owner knows not of.”

— Jonathan Swift

84. “Not die here in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”

— Jonathan Swift

85. “Bachelor’s fare: bread and cheese, and kisses.”

— Jonathan Swift

86. “Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.”

— Jonathan Swift

87. “Come, agree, the law’s costly.”

— Jonathan Swift

88. “I love white Portugal wine better than claret, champagne, or burgundy. I have a sad vulgar appetite.”

— Jonathan Swift

89. “I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter.”

— Jonathan Swift

90. “I would rather be a freeman among slaves than a slave among freemen.”

— Jonathan Swift

91. “It is remarkable with what Christian fortitude and resignation we can bear the suffering of other folks.”

— Jonathan Swift

92. “Walls have tongues, and hedges ears.”

— Jonathan Swift

93. “The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.”

— Jonathan Swift

94. “Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.”

— Jonathan Swift

95. “The power of fortune is confessed only by the miserable, for the happy impute all their success to prudence or merit.”

— Jonathan Swift

96. “When we desire or solicit anything, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.”

— Jonathan Swift

97. “There is no vice which humankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.”

— Jonathan Swift

98. “It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.”

— Jonathan Swift

99. “Ah, a German and a genius ! A prodigy, admit him !”

— Jonathan Swift

100. “Most sorts of diversion in men, children and other animals, are in imitation of fighting.”

— Jonathan Swift